Sewing with Minky Material or Cuddle Fabric

This is cuddle fabric. It's also known as minky and it's even sometimes referred to as velboa. And it's a really great cuddly fabric. It's perfect for children's items, for blankets, for pajama pants, things like that. It's so soft and nice.

You might recognize it at the fabric store with having some little bumps on it but it also comes in these really fun prints that coordinate and all kinds of things. And a lot of the times I think sewers wanna choose this fabric because it's so soft and great. And then you take it to your machine and you realize that it's a bit of a bear to sew and so I'm gonna give you some tips on how to handle this fabric and make a few things with it. First off, if you are using minky, cuddle, velboa whatever you wanna call it and sewing it to itself, it's actually relatively simple because when you have right sides together of this fabric you can see the pile of it kind of grips itself. And so when it's under the machine there isn't a lot of shifting that's gonna go on.

I would recommend though raising your presser foot pressure if you have the capabilities of doing that on your machine and that's just going to account for all of the loft that you're sewing through. And so you won't be fighting with it and trying to push it through the machine. This particular children's pant. I decided to go ahead and try out on the serger. So you can see all of my seams are serged here with just a four-thread overlock, narrow four-thread overlock.

And I was a little bit nervous because the minky will shed all over the place. Probably by the end of this segment there will be little piles of fur and particles flying through the air. It'll be all over my shirt, things like that. Once you cut it, it starts flying through the air. So that is one of the big sort of pitfalls when you're sewing it.

And so I thought if I use the serger it's going to get caught up in my serger, all the mechanisms and all of that and I'll have problems on my hands. So I tried it against my better judgment and actually I had a lot less fibers in the air. A lot less shedding was going on and it was actually a very pleasant experience. So when I was done with the pants I made sure to clean the machine very well and get all of those fibers out of there. And truth be told there wasn't as many as I thought so you may want to try it but just be cautious about it.

And if you're really concerned, you can just get it serviced when you're done making your 12 pants for Christmas or whatever the project may be. And also be wary if you do choose a minky that has an even higher loft than this, you may want to steer clear of the serger altogether but I did have a great time with it. Now, if you're pairing minky with something else like a flannel or a cotton, that's a pretty stable fabric. You're still gonna run into some problems because you're using two different weights of fabric. And as we know, that always creates a problem no matter what the fibers are but with the minky it's just a little, a little more troublesome because of the slippage that can occur.

So this is a little pacifier holder that I've made. One side is minky. The side that would be against your child's face. And the other side is a cute quilting cotton. Now to sort of prep everything and make sure that the two layers would feed together smoothly, I sort of doubled up the cotton fabric and hemmed all of that attached to my clip or what have you already.

And then I pinned the minky to the other side. And as you can see, I've started pinning here all the way down and you're gonna find you need a lot of pins when you're working with minky. And I kind of just tuck it in there as I'm sewing. And I just went over the existing stitching that I had already done. And that to me was the best way of doing this project because it's so small.

I tried doing it where you would sew both sides and leave an opening for turning and then turn the whole thing right side out. But the clips weren't fitting inside and then you have this opening that's a little bit bulky and you can't iron minky or it'll melt. So I just found that this was the best method for this. Now I thought to be really challenging I would choose another fabric. That's really challenging to sew and pair it with the minky and see how I did because a blanket is really such the nicest thing to make out of this fabric.

It's so great for a baby shower gift. They even make them in like really fun animal prints and things like that. So it's not just for children but for this particular project, I thought it would be really nice to have a satin paired with the minky. And that way you have a cool side of the blanket and a warm side of the blanket. So how to sew that without going completely crazy.

Here's what I came up with. I've made some swatches here so you can see three different ways of going about sewing this and this is kind of my trial and error how I came up with the best method I think works. So what I've done in general to make the blanket is cut the satin four inches wider on all sides than the minky. And that's because I'm going to do this sort of self binding and mitering technique with it. That way you don't need a separate piece of satin to bind the whole thing which just causes you an even bigger headache.

So I'm gonna show you how it is if you don't use a single pin or anything else to help you sew this. Now I'm gonna leave my corners alone because I will come back and mitre those later. But for the purposes of this sample I don't think we're gonna wanna finish anything. Another great tip, whether you're doing minky on minky or minky on cotton or minky on satin is to install a walking foot on your machine if you happen to have one of those, it's really great for making sure all the layers stay together. And I will admit this is a very small sample.

So it's easier to sew than a giant, crib-sized blanket like we have here, however you can see how it's curling up. I don't have a very straight seam here. I've gone totally off. And so now my fabrics don't even match up anymore. It's just kind of a nightmare.

And the same thing would happen. I guarantee you if this was cotton as well because the minky just has a tendency to shift. It's just the nature of the beast. So the other thing you can try is pinning and you can see a little bit how I've started to mitre this corner here and I'll show you that technique in just a bit. But the problem with pinning, especially with satin is that every time a pin goes in that satin fabric, you're running the risk of a snag whether it's putting the pin in or putting the pin out, you could have a runner across the entire width of the binding piece.

And no one wants that. So you are running that risk. You can use silk pins which I have here to minimize that risk. If you really wanna try the pins but I'll be honest and say I have what 15 pins in here and this is a small four-inch sample. So imagine doing a 44 by 60 inch sample and how many pins you would need just to make sure that this didn't shift but it is doable.

It will work just not as efficiently, as quickly and as nicely in my opinion, as what I discovered next which is my favorite friend in the sewing room, basting spray, otherwise known as temporary spray adhesive. Now it is glue. So part of me thinks it's a little bit of a cheater in the sewing room because I like to sew rather than glue things. However, the professional finish that you get from using this particular glue is so fantastic, especially in a project like this that why not use it, it's out there for us. Let's use it.

So what I have done already and you wanna make sure that you're in a well ventilated area or even outside, especially if it's not windy and take care of yourself when you're using this stuff. There'll be instructions on it for how to use it, how far away to place the can when you're spraying it, things like that, just to make sure that you're taking care and being safe. So I've already sprayed my square to my larger square. And actually over time the spray adhesive will actually dissipate. So if you spray your whole blanket and then you're exhausted from spraying your whole blanket and you go away and you come back two days later to make your blanket you might find that it's come undone or it's not as tacky as you need it to be.

So you may have to redo it or at least touch it up a little bit. So keep that in mind, read the instructions for sure. So I've sprayed this on here and now I'm going to spray all of the rest of it so that all I need are four pins in this entire piece. All I needed for this whole huge blanket was four pins. And that was just to secure my mitered corners.

So we're gonna start spraying and I'm gonna get as far away as I can here. And you just wanna do the edge and I'm gonna leave my corners alone for now. And that's the other thing about this is you can't iron it on a high heat, the satin and you don't wanna touch the minky to the iron as I already mentioned. So getting a really crisp binding is gonna be challenging. And you just smooth it out with your fingers.

You can see where I'm going with this. It's so fantastic. And since it's temporary adhesive, you can adjust this like I'm doing and worry about your corners later. And since I did four inches all the way around of course this is my mini version. I'm gonna have a two-inch binding piece.

Just kind of loosening up the corners so that they don't get caught in everything while I move forward. You can see not a single pucker. Oh, that's so great. Now I'm gonna spray it again. Make sure you protect your surface as well of course and it washes away with water, no problem.

And then gonna mostly worry about securing the center of each side so that I can do my corners in a little bit. And if you have stray threads like this it's gonna cause a little bit of a bump. Make sure you take care of those as you go along. Okay, you can see now when I go to sew this I don't need to do anything. It's acting as one piece and you're gonna be sewing from satin on the top and satin on the back.

So it's going to be like the minky doesn't even exist. Now to do the corner, gonna pull it out. This is the only challenging part of the whole thing. And it's really quite simple. I trim the corner off.

I'm gonna put one side down flat and fold it at an angle and then fold it over itself. And there is my mitre. And since there's glue everywhere you may have to adjust that a little bit and finesse it so that it's perfect to your liking. I would get rid of this little crease here. So like I said, only challenging part right here.

And you only have to do it four little times. So there we have my little mitre fold. And with this little piece, I probably wouldn't even put in a pin because again, risking the snag but I will put it right in at the corner and pin it through the side here. And I'm gonna do that all four corners and start sewing it. I just did a simple straight stitch as close to the fold as possible.

Gonna move the pin as I get to it, leave the needle down in the corner point, pivot. I'll trim my threads here just so you can see the one corner And then after I'm done with the whole perimeter I go in and do a straight stitch just down the mitre fold to secure it. And I do backstitch just a little bit here. Trim my thread And there it is. It's so perfectly straight, not a single pucker on either side.

It's so professional looking. And I mean, when you give somebody a big blanket like this out of these two luxurious fabrics they are never going to believe that you made this yourself. So have a lot of fun with minky but definitely get some spray adhesive on hand and you might wanna lint brush as well.